Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump election?

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Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by delecta

Kids today can't even tell the time on an analog clock, if you're banking your future on them you're pretty much f'd. Someone needs to come up with a voting app, other then that, good luck.

Kids today will develop the secure voting app with biometric verification while you are drooling into your Depends™. You're gonna be the one thats going to need all the luck you can before they start harvesting your organs.

This post is temporary and my disappear at the discretion of the managment

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Large transactions involving banks are typically a matter of public record, and are not in any way protected by attorney/client privilege, which covers private communications.

Cohen is a bag man for Trump and other top creeps. He accepts the swag, deals out hush money, hires the enforcers, and acts as the link between the supposedly law-abiding rich and corporations, and the realm of criminal action.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

When I was growing up in Las Vegas, some of my school friends had fathers who were engaged in various criminal pursuits. Even in high school gossip, it was well known that if a person wanted a piece of land re-zoned for development, or needed a county permit, etc. there was a law firm that specialized in such matters. They asked for a pretty substantial sum as a retainer. Then they carried the paper for the permit application or whatever, and when it went though, billed for their "legal services." The bribe (in Vegas jargon, the juice or the vig) was included in the enormous bill.

It's still pretty much the same game. But now the bag man is in the bag.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by johnw

Isn't this Cohen's company?

I got the impression from the early coverage that these people had hired Cohen as their attorney.

If it was business, how was it discoverable in the Stormy Daniels case? Only thing going on there is, was there a contract with Trump. Avenatti wants to show no payment by Trump to Cohen before or after the non-disclosure deal, is that the idea? That's why he needs Cohen's business accounts?

If he convinces the court that there was no payment, it helps the Stormy Daniels case. If there was payment, it supports the Trump side, which is, there was a contract, which in turn would support a lawsuit for breach of contract, so SD would have to repay the 130.

Not good PR for Trump to be using Cohen to sue hookers for breach of confidentiality, you might think. But I think Trump is a kind of Pimp Hero to reds. This kind of thing only adds to his cachet.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by Osborne Russell

I got the impression from the early coverage that these people had hired Cohen as their attorney.

If it was business, how was it discoverable in the Stormy Daniels case? Only thing going on there is, was there a contract with Trump. Avenatti wants to show no payment by Trump to Cohen before or after the non-disclosure deal, is that the idea? That's why he needs Cohen's business accounts?

If he convinces the court that there was no payment, it helps the Stormy Daniels case. If there was payment, it supports the Trump side, which is, there was a contract, which in turn would support a lawsuit for breach of contract, so SD would have to repay the 130.

Not good PR for Trump to be using Cohen to sue hookers for breach of confidentiality, you might think. But I think Trump is a kind of Pimp Hero to reds. This kind of thing only adds to his cachet.

First of all, a porn star is not a hooker. Second, we're talking about the account used to pay the porn star, so why is it a mystery how her lawyer found out about this?

http://www.businessinsider.com/how-d...rmation-2018-5Steven Feldman, a former assistant US attorney for the Southern District of New York who now works as a defense attorney, told Business Insider that Avenatti could have made a third-party-discovery request for the banking information in the pending California civil case between Daniels — whose real name is Stephanie Clifford — and Cohen."If you are the plaintiff's attorney, once you file the civil complaint, you now have civil subpoena power in the case," he said. "Plaintiff's counsel could have made the request in March 2018 to the appropriate bank, and that would be enough time for him to get the information back now."

And finally, Avenatti does not strike me as someone who would release information that hurts his case. He's got his opponents falling all over themselves with contradictions, which won't help them in court.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by johnw

First of all, a porn star is not a hooker.

I suppose that's technically true. You didn't have sex for money, you just demanded money for not talking about it. Not prostitution. Extortion.

Originally Posted by johnw

Second, we're talking about the account used to pay the porn star, so why is it a mystery how her lawyer found out about this?

1. Because he doesn't say how.
2. Because you don't get bank records for the asking, especially not the records of an attorney's trust account.

From the article you cite:

Roland Riopelle, a former federal prosecutor with the US Attorney's Office for the Southern District of New York and a partner at Sercarz & Riopelle, said the information was something that could be obtained by subpoena or in discovery, but as far as Daniels's pending litigation and Cohen's case, that has yet to occur.

Mitchell Epner, a former assistant US attorney for the District of New Jersey and now a lawyer at Rottenberg Lipman Rich, told Business Insider it was "very interesting" that Avenatti has pushed publicly for the release of those records.

"The fact that there is a suspicious activity report ordinarily is not public information," he said. "And certainly the number of suspicious activity reports would not be public information. And his saying that there were three is a very specific data point. Which leads me to conclude that either he's seen them, or somebody has read them to him, or somebody has described them in detail."

Originally Posted by johnw

And finally, Avenatti does not strike me as someone who would release information that hurts his case. He's got his opponents falling all over themselves with contradictions, which won't help them in court.

That's as may be. I want to know how he got it. It's a matter of public interest.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by Osborne Russell

I suppose that's technically true. You didn't have sex for money, you just demanded money for not talking about it. Not prostitution. Extortion.

1. Because he doesn't say how.
2. Because you don't get bank records for the asking, especially not the records of an attorney's trust account.

But, as stated in the article I quoted, you can get them by subpoena. And you are the first person I know of to describe this as an attorney's trust account. It's a shell company, which is not the way trust accounts usually work.

Now, it may be that there's something suspicious here, but I'm currently going with the obvious explanation.

Before there was a hint of collusion with Russia, there were questions about Donald Trump’s finances. In those more innocent days, the questions were mainly about propriety — why wouldn’t he release his tax returns like other presidential candidates had? — and perhaps a hint of ox-goring: “Billionaire? He’s no billionaire!”

This week it has become clearer that questions about Mr. Trump’s finances, and those about whether his campaign cooperated with Russian hacking of the 2016 election, need to be asked in the same breath.On Tuesday, we learned that a company linked to a Russian oligarch — as well as corporations with business before the administration — gave a total of more than $1 million to a shell company that the president’s fixer, Michael Cohen, set up just before the election to pay hush money to Stormy Daniels, the porn star who says she had sex with Mr. Trump in 2006.

Those corporations — AT&T, the pharmaceutical company Novartis and Korea Aerospace — paid the shell company, Essential Consultants, during last year. All do business with the federal government or can be affected by federal actions, such as possible controls on drug prices or the Justice Department’s lawsuit against AT&T’s proposed acquisition of Time Warner.

On Wednesday, Novartis said it had actually spent $1.2 million in total, $800,000 more than was originally reported, and AT&T said it had paid as much as $600,000, three times what had been reported. Both issued statements denying any wrongdoing but still leaving the impression that they were paying for access to the president or his fixer. Korea Aerospace told The Wall Street Journal that it had hired Essential for legal counseling regarding American accounting standards. Seriously.

This sort of suspicious cash was at the heart of a recent report by The Washington Post that found that in the decade before the election, Mr. Trump did something unusual for a real estate developer — he all but stopped borrowing money. Multiple bankruptcies had no doubt exhausted his welcome at any reputable bank, so perhaps the man who called himself the “King of Debt” became more prudent, or he simply faced reality. What happened next, though, was more unusual. Beginning in 2006, the Trump Organization spent $400 million in cash on various projects. The president’s son Eric said they were able to do that with cash generated by other Trump businesses, even at the height of the Great Recession. That explanation has raised the eyebrows of business experts.

It also contradicts what Eric and his older brother, Donald Trump Jr., said in the years before the word “Russian” became radioactive for them. “Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross section of a lot of our assets,” Donald Jr. said in 2008. “We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia.”

The golf writer James Dodson said last year that during a visit to a Trump golf course in 2013, Eric told him of his family company’s financing: “Well, we don’t rely on American banks. We have all the funding we need out of Russia.”

Around the time Donald Trump said goodbye to American banks, he said hello to Mr. Cohen, a lawyer whose résumé, one might have expected, would have screamed, “Stay away!” to a legitimate businessman.

From at least 1999, according to a recent Times report, Mr. Cohen had dealings with Russian mob figures and began finding business deals in, and with people from, Russia and the former Soviet Union. By 2007, Mr. Cohen was working for the Trump Organization as a fixer and deal maker.

Even during the 2016 campaign, Mr. Cohen pursued plans for a Trump Tower in Moscow, coordinating with Felix Sater, a felon with ties to Russian mobsters who had worked on other deals with Mr. Trump.

After Mr. Trump’s election, while the F.B.I. was investigating whether his campaign helped Russian efforts to put Mr. Trump in the Oval Office, Mr. Cohen visited his boss in the White House. During that February 2017 visit, Mr. Cohen left for the national security adviser, Michael Flynn, a plan to lift sanctions against Russia, which had been imposed for its attacks on Ukraine. These sanctions had squeezed the sorts of people Mr. Cohen dealt with. The plan was proposed by Mr. Sater and a Ukrainian politician with ties to Paul Manafort, a former Trump campaign chairman.

Mr. Flynn has since pleaded guilty to lying about his contacts with Russians, and Mr. Manafort is under indictment on charges of financial crimes that involved Russians.

At the moment, Americans are lucky to have Robert Mueller, the special counsel, examining all of this. Mr. Mueller was appointed after Mr. Trump fired the F.B.I. director James Comey because of his frustrations with the Russia investigation. Mr. Mueller has been looking at Mr. Cohen’s affairs and records from the Trump Organization. And one question that Mr. Trump’s lawyers say Mr. Mueller wants to ask the president is what communication did he have with Michael D. Cohen, Felix Sater and others, including foreign nationals, about Russian real estate developments during the campaign.

Russians and cash — they’ve been a part of Mr. Trump’s life for years, and now they’re elements of the investigation into whether his campaign conspired with Moscow to corrupt American democracy. Mr. Trump’s affection toward the Russian president has led many to ask, “What does Putin have on Trump?” Maybe the ledgers will tell.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by johnw

But, as stated in the article I quoted, you can get them by subpoena. And you are the first person I know of to describe this as an attorney's trust account. It's a shell company, which is not the way trust accounts usually work.

Now, it may be that there's something suspicious here, but I'm currently going with the obvious explanation.

Subpenas are blocked by privilege.

Trust and shell are not mutually exclusive. Coulda gone to shell account from trust account or vice versa. Don't know, but the answer could turn out to be important. For example, if the US Atty in NY can show probable cause that the trust account is involved, they get their search warrant. They seize the records. The stuff may nevertheless be privileged, in fact, it is privileged unless and until the special master un-privileges it. The basis of un-privileging could be the connection to crime.

Comes down to how tight is the rope around Cohen's scrotum before they hoist away. Slippery little devils.

BTW the Korean Aerospace outfit says they paid their money for legal services. That money had to go into the trust account even if it went into the shell first.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by Keith Wilson

Oh, there's a huge steaming pile of suspicious stuff here, and at most a very, very tiny part of it is how the records became public.

It's a larger question than the records becoming public. How can they used, where, and for what purpose? That depends very much on whether Cohen was acting as Trump's attorney, his business partner, both, neither, as to each communication individually, and who is being prosecuted for what, by whom.

Some idea of the issues involved:

While the privilege can be waived, only Trump — and not Cohen — has the right to do so.

"It is absolutely the case that, even if he is criminally liable himself, Michael Cohen is not allowed to disclose client confidences learned through the attorney-client relationship about any client without their permission," said Paul Rosenzweig, a former legal adviser to Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr.

"The ethics rules allow lawyers to disclose client confidences from a representation if the lawyer is charged with wrongdoing arising out of the representation," said New York University law professor Stephen Gillers. "You can't trade on client information unless you're charged with wrongdoing because of the representation of that client."

Adding to the complexity is the fact that Cohen also served as an attorney for the Trump Organization and acted on his own in various business deals. That means prosecutors could be entitled to ask some questions about Cohen's experiences in dealings with Russia, for example, but may not be entitled to pry into what Cohen told Trump on such issues or vice versa.

"They could ask about what he negotiated with the Russians but cannot ask what he told Trump or what Trump told him," said Silverglate. "The relationship between Trump and his lawyer was probably very mixed. If they were in business together and had a part of some deal together, that wouldn't surprise me."

From the same story, I can't say I understand this part, but it sounds dangerous:

Lawyers said prosecutors are likely to tread carefully because any misstep could jeopardize the investigation by the U.S. attorney's office in New York into Cohen, which includes his payment of $130,000 in alleged "hush money" payment to porn star Stormy Daniels, who claims she had sex with Trump and was paid to buy her silence shortly before the 2016 election. Trump says he was unaware of the payment.

That federal probe also reportedly involves Cohen's personal business dealings, including financing of dozens of New York City taxi medallions that Cohen has owned.

Casual treatment of information from Cohen could even put at risk Mueller's investigation into alleged collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, attorneys said.

The whole shebang down the toilet, because some people couldn't keep their mouths shut and wait?

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by Osborne Russell

Subpenas are blocked by privilege.

Trust and shell are not mutually exclusive. Coulda gone to shell account from trust account or vice versa. Don't know, but the answer could turn out to be important. For example, if the US Atty in NY can show probable cause that the trust account is involved, they get their search warrant. They seize the records. The stuff may nevertheless be privileged, in fact, it is privileged unless and until the special master un-privileges it. The basis of un-privileging could be the connection to crime.

Comes down to how tight is the rope around Cohen's scrotum before they hoist away. Slippery little devils.

BTW the Korean Aerospace outfit says they paid their money for legal services. That money had to go into the trust account even if it went into the shell first.

The account appears to have mainly been used for fees for 'consulting services.' And the name of the shell company was 'Essential Consulting.' Sounds more like a company that accepted consulting contracts than a lawyer's trust account.

And actually, KAI says Essential Consulting did no legal work for them. From the Washington Post:

The South Korean aviation firm that in November paid $150,000 to a shell company run by Michael Cohen, President Trump’s personal attorney, was at the time embroiled in a major corruption scandal and seeking to land a lucrative defense contract from the U.S. government.Korea Aerospace Industries said in a statement Wednesday the payment was for advice on matters that included “Cost Accounting Standards,” highly technical bookkeeping rules that would apply to the company’s bid for U.S. defense work. KAI said its contract with the company, Essential Consultants, ended in November.KAI said Essential Consultants did no legal or lobbying work regarding its bid for the contract. Cohen did not respond to calls seeking comment.

Apparently, they wish us to believe that Cohen was an expert in cost accounting.

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

More people are asking how, and why, Cohen became the 'go to' guy for the companies that paid money into his shell account. Cohen has no specific expertise in the various industries which saw fit to use him as a consultant. For example..

Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), the ranking member of the Senate Finance Committee, sent inquiries to pharmaceutical giant Novartis and to Cohen’s attorney on Friday asking them to turn over documents explaining their arrangement.

In a letter to Novartis CEO Vasant Narasimhan, Wyden expressed “deep concern” that the company was pushing the Food and Drug Administration for approval of an expensive cancer drug at the same time that it entered a $1.2 million contract with Cohen for health care insights that he was unqualified to provide.

He noted that Cohen’s shell company, Essential Consultants LLC, was not a health care policy consultancy, that Cohen himself was not a lobbyist and that the sum Novartis paid Cohen “far exceeded what it paid any of the registered lobbying firms it engaged during the first 15 months of the Trump administration.”

Wyden asked the company and Cohen to turn over their contract and statement of work, details about how each payment was made, and all communications between the two parties. He also asked to answer a simple but critical question: “Why did Novartis decide to engage Mr. Cohen and/or his firm(s)?”

Re: Cohen accepted $500,000 from a sanctioned Russian oligarch after the Trump electi

Originally Posted by johnw

The account appears to have mainly been used for fees for 'consulting services.' And the name of the shell company was 'Essential Consulting.' Sounds more like a company that accepted consulting contracts than a lawyer's trust account.

And actually, KAI says Essential Consulting did no legal work for them.

They say that now. Could be someone told them they were putting him in a jam when they said they paid him for legal advice. Which is a lot more likely than hiring him for accounting advice. "We can't say we hired him for accounting. That would make us look stupid. Say we hired him as a lawyer. Wait . . . what?"

KAI is poised to be a partner for an estimated $16 billion deal with Lockheed Martin to build T-X 50A trainer jet. KAI has said that it hired Essential for legal counselling regarding U.S. accounting standards on production costs.